Article Advise

submitted: Aug 24th 2008 | by: RobertGantt | Total views: 1 | Word Count: 629 | |

Superstition: Putting keywords in the meta tag will get your page a good search engine ranking all by itself.

Fact: This is not enough by itself; there have to be keywords within the page itself (i.e.in the copy). If you merely have keywords in your meta tags, search engines may consider it to be spam and ignore your site, hurting your rankings!

Superstition: You can get your page ranked higher with hidden links or text in a page .

Fact: Keyword stuffing, as it's sometimes called, and/or hidden links in the page can get your website banned or penalized if uncovered. Many search engines consider it spamming. In the early days of search engine advertising it was effective but it's time has past.

Superstition: The more reciprocal links you have with other sites, the better your own search engine ranking will be.

Fact: Not necessarily so. If you are linked with some pages, such as FFA pages and link farms, his can make your ranking lower, not higher. What you should try to have is inbound links from sites which have quality content relevant to your site. While no one is exactly sure how Google calculates this, relevant links seem to be given far more weight.

Superstition: Most sites are optimized. What chance do I have to succeed?

Fact: Studies show that up to 60% of all websites are not properly optimized to rank high in search engines. The nature of search engines makes it difficult for web designers to properly optimize web pages for their clients. Always discuss optimization with your web designer to determine what services are included in the project.

Superstition: The more times you repeat the keyword in the page, the higher it will rank.

Fact: All the search engines use different algorithms for ranking. They all claim keyword density is important, but they don't say what the proper density is. If your keyword density is too high or too low you will be penalized. Some so-called experts say the keyword density should be 3%, some say as high as 6%. No one really knows.

Superstition: Once your site in indexed by the search engines changes to it will have little effect.

Fact: This is entirely untrue. You should update your website as often as possible. Even simple maintenance like fixing a broken link can improve your PR. Search engines will not spider your site as often if they repeatedly run into broken links. Changing your content (and on the web, content is everything) will help search engines find you and definitely helps out your PR. Remove old material as it becomes out of date and add new content whenever you can when you add new content, your site will be re-indexed more often.

Superstition: You don't need a robots.txt file or a sitemap.

Fact: Search engine bots look for the robots.txt file first, since this file tells them what they are allowed to index and what to crawl while on your site. A site map also has the advantage that the search bots will follow each link therein. This is a way to ensure that your site is comprehensively indexed. These two files (sitemap and robots.txt) should be placed in the root level directory of your domain.

Superstition: Search engines cannot index pages with Flash and using Flash in your page will lower it's ranking.

Fact:While search engines do not index the Flash movie itself, they will index the text of the movie (you need to specify Flash text in your HTML) along with the rest of your page. Flash has no effect on the site itself in terms of indexing and does not keep your site from being crawled either. What search engines don't like is websites which automatically re-direct, including Flash pages which do this. It's the redirection, not the Flash which is the problem here.

About the Author

Robert Gantt is an web expert who has taught 100's of firms how to promote their businesses and make more money online. Get all the free resources you need to make money online The Complete Online Resource Guide

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